The Rachel Incident
The hilarious international bestseller about unexpected love, nominated for a TikTok Book Award
-
-
4.0 • 117 Ratings
-
-
- £9.99
-
- £9.99
Publisher Description
The international bestseller: a hilarious, heartfelt story of all-consuming and unexpected love
Nominated for a TikTok Book Award
'If you've ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did' GABRIELLE ZEVIN
'Funny, nostalgic, sexy' MONICA HEISEY
'Hilarious, wise and wonderfully written' GRAHAM NORTON
____________________________________________________________________________
Everyone in Cork remembers the Rachel Incident. But what really happened? It's simple. It's complicated. It's about love, sex and friendship. It's definitely about betrayal. And, above all, it's the story of Rachel and James, two twenty-somethings who met at a bookshop, became best friends, and spent one unforgettable year screwing up and growing up.
____________________________________________________________________________
'Reading it is like hearing your funniest, sexiest friend tell you the best story they know' KATHERINE RUNDELL
'Sharply witty, warm-hearted and wise' GUARDIAN
'O'Donoghue captures all the intensity of messy young love' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'A book full of love, and it is extremely easy to love reading it' VOGUE
'Chaos at its finest' STYLIST
'Easily 13/10 . . . Funny, lovely, romantic' MARIAN KEYES
The Rachel Incident was a #2 bestseller in Ireland in June 2023
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Cork circa 2010: Rachel and James meet and immediately fall deeply, completely into passionate but platonic love, differences of class, opportunity and sexual orientation notwithstanding. Their friendship feels destined to last forever, but Rachel’s literature professor interrupts their blissfully chaotic existence and changes the course of all their lives, in increasingly unexpected ways. As genuinely hilarious and often uncomfortably astute as O’Donoghue’s writing is, the specifics of time and place make this much more than an entertaining account of the particular thrills, confusion and uncertainty of early-twentysomething life. There’s also a simmering, justifiably bitter anger at an Ireland that still ruthlessly suppressed women’s bodily autonomy and punished every limited choice available, leaving scars that may fade, but will never fully disappear. Acerbic, witty and empathetic in equal measure, this is a thoroughly invigorating read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two 20-something roommates become enmeshed with an older married couple in this smart and colorful outing from O'Donoghue (Promising Young Women). It's 2009, and James Devlin, a Christmas temp at O'Conner Books in Cork, Ireland, initially clashes with his bookseller colleague Rachel Murray due to their class differences—Rachel is from a family of cosmetic dentists and bankers while James is from rough-and-tumble Manchester—though they soon become friends and rent a cottage together. After Rachel invites her former university professor Fred Byrne to give a reading at the store, his arrival with Deenie, his wife and publisher, adds intrigue, beginning with James encouraging Rachel to seduce Fred, Rachel entering a fraught friendship with Deenie, and James processing his on-and-off relationship with an emotionally unavailable man by writing a TV script. Along the way, there's a pregnancy and a plan for an abortion. In addition to the interpersonal drama, O'Donoghue pulls no punches in her depiction of the abortion crisis in Ireland during the period, showing how women either traveled abroad or resorted to illegal and potentially dangerous methods to terminate pregnancies. Key to it all is O'Donoghue's spot-on portrayal of Rachel's youthful yearning ("I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously"). In O'Donoghue's world, there's plenty to fall in love with.
Customer Reviews
An Ode to Friendship
As a lover of books and a hater of university, this book really struck a chord with me. O’Donoghue perfectly captures the beautiful trauma of relationships - both old and new - by exploring friendship, family and fornication through the eyes of the titular Rachel. There’s certainly plenty to get your teeth into here: the unspoken distress of abortion and miscarriage; the pretentious nature of academia; repressed sexuality and the ensuing lies this causes; the ability of time to distort perception; the drudgery of everyday working life.
I don’t often leave comments or reviews on here, but I really clicked with this book and I hope plenty of other folk give it a chance too.
Great book, hard to put down!
Really enjoyed reading The Rachel Incident - so much so that I was fighting with myself not to read the final pages in a taxi hurtling around the streets Xi’an! Rachel and James’ friendship felt very real and the book was well-paced. Would definitely recommend!